The Jefferson Exchange

News & Information: Mon-Fri • 8am-10am | 8pm-10pm

JPR's live interactive program devoted to current events and newsmakers from around the region and beyond. It airs on JPR's News & Information service. Choose that service from the stream above or find your station here.

Participate in the live program by calling 800-838-3760 or emailing JX@jeffnet.org.

Ways to Connect

Veterans Day came and went, but the Go Vets program continues at the Rogue Valley Transportation District. The name is almost self-explanatory; it's about helping vets find mobility through riding RVTD buses.

And mobility can lead to so much more... jobs, friends, shopping, and more. The program includes training for vets in making full use of the system.

Ashland-based Project A started helping businesses and other organizations put up websites and expand their technology before many of us had even seen the web. The success of Project A has allowed co-founder Jim Teece to branch out into other ventures.

Those include buying a business called Art Authority, which makes high quality prints for notecards and other products from the art of museums around the world.

There's a certain sense of virtue that comes from flinging an item into a recycle bin. "At least I'm not throwing it away," you might think.

But even before China clamped down on the recyclable materials it would accept, we were lagging behind other countries in recycling. About 34% of our materials get recycled, a much lower rate than, for example, Germany's 65%.

Cannupa Hanska Luger grew up on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, the scene of many a protest over the Dakota Access Pipeline. He is an artist, but incorporates activism into his work as well.

One of his creations is the "seed bomb," a combination of clay and native plant seeds broken on the land to help restore native habitats (they are NOT explosive).

Cannupa Hansker Luger gives a workshop in making seed bombs as part of a visit to Eugene this weekend (November 17).

Maybe it's because our live broadcast falls between breakfast and lunch, but we like talking about food. In fact, we like it enough to launch a regular local segment about food. It starts here... under the name "Savor."

"Call Her Ganda" is a new documentary from PJ Raval, an award-winning Filipino-American filmmaker from Austin, Texas.

The film is about the controversy surrounding the murder of Jennifer Laude, a Filipina trans woman, by an American serviceman in the Philippines in 2014. "Call Her Ganda" premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year.

The screening is sponsored by the Queer Resource Center and Women's Resource Center on the Southern Oregon University campus, by the SOU Student Film Club, and by Ashland Independent Film Festival, as part of the campus events for Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR). The film will be shown at the SOU Music Recital Hall on November 18 at 4 PM.

America's independence from England wasn't just fought on the battlefield. Early Americans insisted on a new way of speaking that would be a distinctly American variation of English.

Linguist Rosemarie Ostler, who lives in Eugene, has traced the evolution of American English, and the cultural mix that produced terms like "gerrymander" and "gnarly." She lays them out in her book Splendiferous Speech.

We have so many pathways to communicate with people now... phone, text message, email... and that's before we even enter the realm of social media.

Just the same, studies indicate people actually feel more isolated in this age of hyper-connectedness. Dan Schawbel makes his living advising businesses on helping employees work well together, he's the research director at Future Workplace.

The City of Ashland owns a big chunk of property across Interstate Five from town, and there are always ideas floating around for uses for the land.

The Imperatrice property, as it's known, has been proposed for the location of electricity-generating solar panels, among other ideas. Which thrills people who favor renewable energy, but poses some issues for bird fanciers.

Because the land is home to a colony of grasshopper sparrows, a bird species that has mostly disappeared in some parts of the region.

It's astonishing to look at maps from hundreds of years ago and realize just how accurate some of them are, despite their creators possessing very primitive mapping tools.

Things are just a bit easier for the people at the University of Oregon's InfoGraphics Lab. They have satellites and myriad other technologies available in helping them create maps and other visual aids for the Department of Geography, the University at large, and Oregon state government agencies.

One of the lab's recent projects: an atlas showing wildlife migration routes, made in collaboration with the University of Wyoming.

Contemplating the end of life itself is an enormous task. And there's an additional degree of complexity when someone considers making use of an assisted-suicide law, like the ones on the books in Oregon and California.

End of Life Choices Oregon works as a third party, sharing its expertise on Oregon's Death With Dignity Law with people considering ending their lives. Sue Porter is the founding executive director of EOLCOR, as it calls itself.

Octavio Solis is used to telling the stories of other people in his work. He's a playwright with a large body of work and several awards to show for it; his plays have been produced at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, among many other venues.